What should I fill my raised beds with?

Filling raised garden beds with high quality soil is one of the most important things you can do to set your veggie garden up for success.

For bulk soil in Central Oregon (typically less expensive than bagged products), we recommend ‘ultrasoil’ from High Desert Mulching. They routinely test their inputs for contamination. This gives us some peace of mind, since nobody wants to deal with remediation of harmful chemicals.

High Desert Mulching has a 3 yard order minimum for delivery, so if you don’t need that much, consider sharing some with your neighbors or picking up a smaller quantity of material on your own.

But what if your garden is up on super steep or rocky terrain, limiting your ability to wheelbarrow your soil into your beds? Then, you may need to resort to bagged materials. We recommend the popular Gardener and Bloome raised bed mix (a soilless mix made primarily of peat moss and coconut coir), but suggest adding some topsoil and additional compost to it to give your soil some structure, nutrients, microorganisms, and good water retention, while also draining well. A reliable ratio is 60% soilless raised bed mix, 20% topsoil, and 20% compost.

What about the Hugelkultur method? If you’ve got a deep bed and yard debris laying around, use it (unless it’s logs of juniper, cedar, or walnut)! If you don’t have material to fill the bottom of your bed with, you can absolutely collect materials from friends, family, etc. to fill your beds, or you might just want to get some bulk soil and fill them up.

We recently built a new raised bed in our front yard demonstration garden and filled the bottom with the remnants of an apple tree, some (not a lot) of pine needles from under our Ponderosa, the contents of our compost bin, and the soil in our potato grow bags after harvest.

We then filled the rest of the bed up with ‘ultrasoil’ (it settled a little bit) afterwards. If you’d like to benefit from the full depth of your raised beds, you’ll likely need to top off your raised bed as the materials down below decompose over time.

Have more questions about building raised garden beds? Schedule a consultation with us and we can help you make a step-by-step plan for setting you up with garden infrastructure! We can also fill your raised beds with soil for you.